From: "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:08:56 -0400
> "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> writes:
> >
> > From: Ian Horrocks <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
> > Subject: Agenda for teleconference Wednesday October 24, 2007
> > Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:52:36 +0100
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > o PROPOSED: Documents to be edited using wiki markup
> > > facilities (templates, tex math, etc). Revisit if there
> > > are problems.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Real TeX, with everything? Just TeX? I would miss LaTeX math stuff.
> > Is there a compact document on the capabilities we would be getting?
>
> AMS LaTeX, as per:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
That page says:
MediaWiki uses a subset of TeX markup, including some extensions
from LaTeX and AMSLaTeX, for mathematical formulae. It generates
either PNG images or simple HTML markup, depending on user
preferences and the complexity of the expression. In the future,
as more browsers are smarter, it will be able to generate
enhanced HTML or even MathML in many cases. (See blahtex for
information about current work on adding MathML support.)
More precisely, MediaWiki filters the markup through Texvc,
which in turn passes the commands to TeX for the actual
rendering. Thus, only a limited part of the full TeX language is
supported; see below for details.
>From this I take it that there are significant restrictions. The web
page describing the language accepted prints as 19 pages.
I don't like the part about displaying as "PNG images". This makes
searching very difficult.
I don't see anything about user-defined commands on the page, from which
I take it that they are not allowed. This is a very serious lack! Of
course, HTML also has a problem here.
[...]
> -- Sandro